Reflections from Greg Watson on The Fuller Challenge Symposium

Tuesday, 28 November 2017

Against the backdrop of our nation, and indeed the world in disarray, the
Buckminster Fuller Challenge 10th Anniversary Awards Celebration was an oasis
of hope. Even after more than forty years of working and playing in the dynamic
space defined by design science, I wasn’t taking any of what was unfolding for
granted. In fact, this was a very special weekend – a watershed in the march
along the critical path that is the design science revolution.

I thought to myself that one might consider the ten-year run of the Challenge as a
Design Science Decade in its own right. I was inspired by the winning projects
and anxious to hear more about them during the day packed with panel
discussions. I was also looking forward to speaking with folks whose entries did
not win but are valuable elements of the BFC Index – the repository of ideas and
design science solutions in varying degrees of readiness, waiting to be deployed
as part of the bloodless coup that will ultimately replace the status quo with a
synergetic self-organizing system wherein the conditions for the total success of
humanity spontaneously emerge and evolve.

My most memorable conversation was over lunch with a young man who was not
one of the award winners. He is a principal in an architecture studio that employs
a design science approach. Our conversation concluded with each of us
commenting on how much Bucky’s seminal work Synergetics: Explorations in the
Geometry of Thinking meant to us. His eyes became wide as he smiled and confided,
“It was like I was reading myself.”